This application relates generally to financial transactions. More specifically, this application relates to systems and methods for coordinating transactions that may be executed by multiple entities.
The marketplace for many financial-services industries includes both large companies that offer a broad range of services and smaller companies that offer more focused services. While the availability of a diverse range of services may be considered to be a positive feature for consumers of these services in the abstract, the very diversity of services often makes it difficult for consumers to identify the most suitable company to use for specific transactions. This is evident, for example, in the money-transfer industry, which generally provides services that allow a person at one location to transfer funds to a person at a different location. A variety of different funds-transfer companies provide different levels of service, with some smaller companies providing relatively few geographical locations, and perhaps only domestic locations, for initiating and receiving the transferred funds; some larger companies provide a greater number of geographical locations, even including international locations and providing currency-exchange services in addition to the bare money-transfer services themselves.
Generally, each of these companies has a different service-fee structure so that one or another company's services may be more advantageous for a customer depending on the specific nature of the transaction. It is, however, cumbersome and inconvenient for customers to determine for any given transaction which company is most suitable, taking into consideration such factors as geographical locations served, the size of service charges, whether currency conversions are performed, the currency-conversion rate offered, and the like. There is, therefore, a general need in the art to provide methods and systems that permit consumers to perform comparisons of different offerings in a convenient manner.